Hacker News

> The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech

Do you think any of them were sincere?

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech

I'm all ears if you've got someone that we can put in power that won't rat fuck us when it comes to privacy or civil liberties. Bonus points if they aren't just slightly less bad than the other guy.

I was definitely one of those useful idiots, not on here though

Democratic party is owned by Israel just as much, if not more.

If it helps you feel better, I voted for free speech and feel that the administration did not hold up their end of the deal. The FTC’s recent “debanking” letter to the payment processors is just theater until something changes. I’ll leave it at that.

I don't think fastmail is going to help you. They are subject to legal requirements too and probably American jurisdiction also despite what their particular position is. https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-u.... People love to hate Google but they're just doing what any corporation subject to law is going to do.

I've migrated everything from Google except for Google Voice. I have yet to find an alternative that can match the feature set and ease of use, regardless of the cost.

I migrated away from my main email, it wasn't a Google mail but it was on the providers domain.

First I signed up with Proton Mail and added my own domain, they fit the bill for me, YMMV.

Then I did a search in my password manager and went through those accounts.

Then I just let the old account sit there for a year. Each time I got an email from something I cared about I'd log in and change mail.

It's been a year now, and I'm about to terminate the old account. All I get there now is occasional spam.

I really dreaded this, but all in all quite painless. And next time it should be easier since I now own the email domain.

edit: Forgot to mention I use Thunderbird, so old email I archived to local folders. That's part if why I ended with Proton, their IMAP bridge allows me to keep using Thunderbird.

I use Fastmail and the main difference I notice is less effective spam filtering — it’s good but not as great as Gmail was.

Overall it’s been an acceptable trade off and I’m glad years ago I switched to a custom domain for email so I can have portability.

Nothing. To the contrary things work BETTER outside the google eco system. The way to do it is incrementally. You don't just yolo delete you Gmail day 1. I still have mine, it's just getting almost no traffic today. Start by moving to an alternative email provider. I use proton. Buy a domain so that you can move providers easily in the future and use catch all email. Do a Google takeout and store the backup somewhere safe (I just use two hard drives sitting and home, replicated). Move the thing that you need day to day somewhere else. You can pay for someone to host it for you or self host. I'm self hosting immich for my Google photos replacement. I'm using proton calendar and email for Gmail service replacements. I was already using signal for most communications, but do that. I moved to graphene to get off of android and there are some sharp edges there if you want off Google play. I had to give up Android auto and gps tends to work worse (graphene does support android auto but I didnt like the tradeoffs). Nothing dealbreaking but can be annoying.

For general security, I also use a yubikey for all services that support it, froze credit with all agencies, and added phone support passwords to all my financial institutions.

I have an android phone and a legacy google account, but I try to limit my exposure to them.

I use Fastmail (with my own domain) for email, contacts, and calendar. Its also set-up to pull email from gmail using imap. Firefox for web browsing on mobile and desktop - and I never use Chrome and keep it disabled on my phone. I currently still use google photos, but I do a takeout every six months and clear-down my photos from their cloud. Paid Office 365 subscription instead of google drive/docs/sheets/etc.

Works well for me.

Personally, I deleted everything I could but kept the Gmail account for a couple of years with a forward to my new account, and after that, I also deleted it. Google Takeout is a very useful way to quickly create a backup of everything Google.

Google leak ALL the time without warrant, Apple as well.

That statement is true at face value. But if you look at how Eric Schmidt travels with government representatives, how rich and powerful BigTech is, and how much they individually and collectively spend on lobbying, then they could be a massive obstacle if they only cared.

Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October / November of last year - a quick Google showed stories in the Guardian, The Intercept, and the Cornell Sun, as well as commentary on Reddit. Not inconceivable that they found about it last October and had six months to leave and de-Googlify.

As other comments say, it was a major story months ago. I started moving off around December. It's a long process to switch over all email accounts. I only recently got self hosted kubernetes set up for immich as a Google photos replacement and some other hosting needs but for the most part I am off google. I get probably 1-2 emails a week still going to Gmail but when I do I just switch those accounts to my new email. It will be a while before the old Gmail is deleted entirely unfortunately.

I didn't mention it in op but I also moved to graphene os which tbh feels much better than android has recently.

Setting aside the fact that this is a new account and it's their only post, what about the timeline is difficult to understand?

The request came in April 2025, and the user was notified the following month. That's next to a year for them to hear about it internally and then quit and setup self-hosting prior to today.

Maybe they read one of the articles written about this incident months ago.

It's this account's only comment and was only created right before posting. It has no credibility.

What about the find-my-phone BLE database, for which I just learned modern phones broadcast even when off? Is that controlled by the OS (Google, Apple) and not the carrier?

Or there may be more to the story than he's telling.

Tracfone burners for any protests?

Democratic backsliding occurs through the gradual erosion of norms and safeguards. One small step at a time...

Which immigration laws are they enforcing in this case? And are you also going to suggest that the Constitution does not protect foreign nationals inside the US?

Apparently they have the power to murder and kidnap American citizens too, or violate their rights if they happen to freely speak or assemble in ways they don't like.

I would call passing a bill to fund it, pretty direct support from Republicans in Congress/Senate.

It's Stephen Miller, enabled by Trump.

a) The kids in cages garnered significant press, public sympathy, and protest

b) I also lived in Austin during that time, and the scale and militarization of current ICE action is on another level to what it was in the early 10's

While this is a common quip that I find pretty funny, it's not really true. What actually happened was that while updating their code of conduct[0], Google changed it to only say "don't be evil" in one place instead of multiple[1].

Google was also sued by former employees who claim they were fired because they tried to prevent Google from doing evil[2], in accordance with the code of conduct they agreed to. Sadly that lawsuit ended with a secret settlement, so we'll never know what a jury thinks. Since "don't be evil" is still in there I suppose it could come up again.

[0]: https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

[1]: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059821677/google-dont-be-evi...

"Don't be evil" was dropped after the DoubleClick acquisition completed their internal takeover of the old "Don't be evil" Google (Google purportedly purchased DoubleClick, in reality they 'did' purchase them, but then the old DoubleClick advertisers slowly took over old Google from the inside out).

What is called "Google" today is actually the old, fully evil, advertising firm "DoubleClick" pretending to be "Google" to make use of the goodwill the "Google" brand name used to have attached to it.

this is a fun story, but... its a story.

here is the google code of conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

scroll down to the bottom, and you will see:

"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

And we all ought to have dropped them, then. (Most of us, myself included, did not.)

I do think they earnestly tried to swim against the current, but yeah, they always knew where it was taking them. Removing the yellow background behind paid results was the turning point IMO.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

No monetization plan — it's all local, no server, near-zero cost to run. Free and open source. I believe good tools should be accessible to everyone. Open source first, monetization will figure itself out down the road.

It's called Hodor — prompt launcher for macOS.

And now they're being let off and called "heroes" by the United States Government.

My opinion doesn't match the article. I do think the user has a legitimate grievance; I am merely suggesting a different avenue for fixing it.

> Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being "too much".

I am saying that this expectation is unrealistic for a British/Trinbagonian citizen, given the political situation in the US right now. For a US citizen having the same issue (Google gave their data to the government without a safeguard), it would be realistic.

> Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?

The user could file a lawsuit in the UK about Google handing over their data without notification and proper jurisdiction. If Google UK employees were involved in handing over this data, they could be prosecuted and fined by the UK government.

Overall what I am hinting at is that this would incentivize Google to put in proper safeguards for non-US citizens. Currently they seem to be treated as a separate, non-protected category.

It's not anything close to minimal. Expecting a company to hold their promise against an authoritarian government is an extremely strong expectation.

It's even harder than people doing the same, because at the end of the day companies are a bunch of stuff that can be taken over and controlled by other people.

They don't sack you from the street and put you in a Camp. At least not anymore.

Say what you want about especially Germany, but there you don't get sued by the president for billions if he doesn't like your opinion.

If you are invited to visit someone's home, and you go, and say nasty things to the homeowner, you'll be tossed out despite your right to free speech.

If you're a guest in another country, act like a guest.

When I was living on a military base in Germany, I and my family were required to behave as a guest of the Germans. The military was quite strict about that.

I didn't have any issue with that. When I travel to another country, I behave as if I was their guest, which I was.

A couple times there were protests in a country I was visiting, and I stayed well away from them.

I think this is common sense advice rather than a philosophical stance about free speech, said advice being generalized as "When in a foreign country, avoid trouble." As an example, if you visit China and start FA about Tibet, you will FO pretty soon, no matter how right you are about free speech.

Yes, this case is a travesty, but that does not change the soundness of the advice.

You can follow the ideal of your forefathers by changing those abusive evil laws. Instead of demanding that foreigners risk their head in protest.

I find the idea of a non citizen protesting and causing social unrest diabolical. Most international students, (whether studying in the US or Europe or Australia or Malaysia or indeed anywhere else) understand that their visa does not grant them the same substantive rights that citizens of a country get. That’s as it should be.

I couldn’t care less about a non citizen’s non existent free speech rights, nor would I expect to be provided rights exclusively afforded to citizens of a country in which I was visiting. Some of you guys have clearly never travelled outside your home countries.

I could imagine someone arriving after independence and advocating against the new government, insisting that they return to King George, would indeed Find Out.

There was an administrative subpoena, which was not signed off by a judge, but does carry significant legal weight.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and Stored Communications Act (SCA) requires service providers to disclose certain types of data (IP addresses, physical address, other identifiers, and session times and durations) in response to an administrative subpoena. The actual content of communications is excluded.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2703

>Switching to 100% European cloud'

Yea, they are even worse. They would sell out in a sec once goverment is going after them.

Where does Google publicly promise they don't do this?

For example, there's https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

"""When we receive a request from a government agency, we send an email to the user account before disclosing information. If the account is managed by an organization, we’ll give notice to the account administrator.

We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request. We’ll provide notice after a legal prohibition is lifted, such as when a statutory or court-ordered gag period has expired.

We might not give notice if the account has been disabled or hijacked. And we might not give notice in the case of emergencies, such as threats to a child’s safety or threats to someone’s life, in which case we’ll provide notice if we learn that the emergency has passed."""

Google is a multi-trillion dollar company that brings in $50b+ a year from Youtube alone, its government contracts are a pittance and it could absolutely do without them. There is no defense for complying in advance with a wannabe-fascist regime, especially when said regime is operating illegally.

The whole notion that Google (or Apple or anyone else) should ignore and flaunt the state is insane by itself.

I don't want megacorps to ignore our EU laws just like I don't want them to ignore US laws. They're not people, they don't get the right to disobedience.